In the same week that the National Literary Trust revealed that only 28.4% of children in Britain read for pleasure outside of school (down from 38.1% in 2005), it was heartening to see the blanket media coverage afforded David Bowie's top 100 reading list, as collated by the Art Gallery of Ontario. For my generation, raised on literate pop music, it was like being given homework by the coolest teacher in the world.

For the "YouTube generation", though, I doubt the 66-year-old's voracious book-a-day appetite for Nabokov, Laing and Mishima had the same impact. Which only underlines the fact that modern chart pop – industrially produced by a risk-averse industry for distracted tweens who generally get to vote for the artists they'd like to perform it – is no longer required to induce academic curiosity, nor teach anyone anything beyond what a young gentleman might do to a young lady later on in the evening.

Born in the 60s, a turbulent decade that demanded we tune in, I count myself lucky to have come of age in the 70s, when it was OK for pop music to be clever. Progressive rock drew on fantasy literature and dystopian sci-fi. Art and film students like Bowie, John Lennon, Lou Reed and Brian Eno (and their punk successors Adam Ant, Ian Dury, Bauhaus, the Human League and Gang of Four) marinated their music in the rich juices of education, whether higher or self-taught. The Cure's debut single, Killing an Arab, inspired me to seek out the Albert Camus novel L'Étranger, and the Human League's Being Boiled taught me the word "sericulture". This was rock'n'roll with footnotes. Good heavens, even Boney M had disco hits about tsarist Russia and the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

We kept up with music's intellectual content by reading NME, which at the time assumed the style of "the philosophy department of a small provincial university," according to Pat Long's History of the NME. What I hadn't learned about philosophers from my Monty Python LPs, I learned from Paul Morley. In the 80s, Morrissey turned literacy into Top Trumps ("Keats and Yeats are on your side, but you lose 'cause weird lover Wilde is on mine") and Echo & the Bunnymen began the track My White Devil like an English lit lesson: "John Webster was one of the best there was/ He was the author of two major tragedies …"

In the 1990s, when the Manic Street Preachers unleashed their storming top 10 hit A Design for Life with the opening line manifesto "Libraries gave us power," they spoke for a generation. This was a band who drew up a reading list before a set list and, along with Radiohead, gave Britpop – more about revival than revision – something to think about.

But it couldn't last. In 2007, self-anointed nu rave pioneers the Klaxons won the Mercury prize with their frenetic debut Myths of the Near Future, dropping references to William Burroughs, Richard Brautigan and JG Ballard. Were they carrying the torch for literate pop? Not quite. In an interview, they proclaimed, "It's the first Wikipedia album! Before we nailed it, we had a huge Wikipedia session." That day, for me, the genie went back in the bottle.

It's tempting to trill the familiar refrain about the decline of education – cuts, league tables, SATs, rote learning to push up grades, Gove's war on the arts – but I think the culprit for a culture deficient in what Pulp's Common People identified as "a thirst for knowledge" is computer technology. In the song, this "thirst" leads the protagonist to St Martin's college; in the internet age, it would be sated by a quick Google search. But what if fingertip availability of information diminishes the joy of learning in the long term? The National Literary Trust study found that 21.5% of young people agreed with the statement: "I would be embarrassed if my friends saw me read." This jars with my fond teenage memory of poring over lyrics with friends in the gatefold-sleeve era. In that analogue age, if you wanted to find something out, you had to ask a grownup, visit the library or listen to Lloyd Cole.

The same technological advances that make books seem moribund to young people enable them to message, text, comment and update statuses all day long. But their reading is what David M Levy, in his book Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, calls "shallow" (road signs, menus, headlines, labels) as opposed to "deep" reading (prose, news, poetry, whatever Bowie's got his nose stuck in, even if it's Viz or Puckoon).

On the plus side, history's most glorious pop music – Motown, Stax, house – required no homework. And there are still smart lyricists in the charts: the Manics' new album comes in a deluxe bound edition with lyrics and art prints – a "book", in other words. But even acute social observers and storytellers such as Jake Bugg, Frank Turner and Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner won't have anybody rushing out to buy, or download, a novel.

We might invest some hope in leftist troubadour Chris T-T, who took literate pop literally on his recent album Disobedience, setting the poems of AA Milne to music. It didn't chart, of course. That'll teach him.